What
did you do over the holiday, the one that changes date once a generation? I
flew to Perth. Australians are so reverent about the Queen's birthday that few
people at work knew why we were having a long weekend. ("It's the October
holiday.") I've been bothering all the British tourists I meet that England
owes the world interesting monarchs, like Charles I and Richard III, Henry and
Elizabeth, even battleaxe Victoria and Edward VIII, a weak king who knew he
shouldn't be king in wartime and had the courage to step down. I'm afraid Elizabeth
II will be remembered only for her questionable child rearing skills. Charles
seems like a cold fish... The Windsors are played out. Are there any Stewart
pretenders left?

Lots
of pics and stories still pending from Darwin/Kakadu. They're somewhere on a
boat. The camera slipped out of my pocket in the wetlands research centre. The
bloke agreed to mail it to me. Should have arrived in 5 days according to the
Posties. My second weekly call went something like this:

Now
I'm glad that me mailed it, as he kept reminding me, "at his own personal
expense." He did put a return address on, so he/I should get it back...eventually.
I hope. Once I got to Perth, I found it was impossible not to take pictures,
so I found a camera on sale. I used to be camera adverse because taking pictures
got in the way of the experience. Now I enjoy it more if I can share the trip.

Metro
Perth is impossible to navigate. The city clusters around the massive Swan River,
with causeways to different lobes. Then there's the signeage...on day 2 I'd
completely redone my plans, dropped the trip to Wave Rock, decided to take tours,
and returned the car to the airport. There were big airport signs until the
last turn, which had a small placard in 1950s script, about 4" high and
2' long. Spent 45 minutes getting an educational tour of Midlands and other
airport-surrounding townlets. But downtown Perth (the lobe called East Perth)
is great for walking. Everything that's fun is within a 20 minute walk.

Aboriginees
getting stoned on the Western Australia Supreme Court lawn.

Perth
is laid back. Nobody really works on Fridays. By Friday noon, the streets and
pubs were full. And Sunday afternoons are the "Sunday Session", when
it's mandatory to hang out in a pub and catch up with all your mates.

James
St. is the student party zone, about 1km of good restaraunts and pubs and clubs,
of which this is the biggest. Saturday nights you can navigate among weaving
among weaving students bellowing "Yo, where the fuck are...are you mate?"
into mobiles. This is the first place in Oz I've seen any hip-hop influence.
All the aboriginees, and a few bleached brothas looked just like Tupac with
cornrows and white bandanas. A few even had the accent and the bit about pointing
your chin up when talking loud. The only thing that was missing was anger.

Another
shot of James St. Went to some very good Indian places here. I spent an awful
lot of time sleeping. Slept all night, then an hour or two in the morning, then
an hour in the afternoon. I did that again today. Wonder if I'll end up like
my maternal grandfather, who spent all day snoring on the sofa and all night
snoring in bed. If I do, I'll have a cat who thinks I'm the greatest thing since
shredded tweet. I do worry, though.

The
galah is a common herd-of-birds-in-the-verge bird in Canberra. They're often
kept as pets because, although they're parrots, they're quiet, Brett.

Koala
petting. These guys eat nothing but eucalpyt leaves--they don't even drink water--and
it's so low calorie that they sleep 80% of the time. (Maybe I've been overdieting.
I have lost 2.5kg though.) After petting this one, my hand actually smelled
like eucalpytus oil.

People
sometimes ask if Sherry and I had any kids.

Freemantle
is the port on the Indian ocean at the mouth of the Swan through which Australia's
main economic base--minerals--passes. The market walls were built with convict
labor. The markets were funky, everything from cherimoyas to astrologers.

Check
this out, Luis. Can your tree do this? (Compare size to apples.)

Freemantle
prison looks a lot nastier on the inside than the outside. The town was originally
a convict colony. I especially enjoyed the flogging post and the gallows.

Rottnest
Island is a half hour speedboat trip from Freemantle. Cars are banned. The island
is about 10 km long. I turned into the Energizer Bunny--hired a mountain bike
and pedalled all day. Perth was my first view of the Indian Ocean. I was well
and truly on the Far Side of the World.

Despite
the bays and lighthouse, I was in a nice mood on Rottnest. Nice in the 1700s
sense when a contemporary called Newton a "nice man", meaning a tetchy
bastard. Newton was paranoid about his rival Robert Hooke. His comment "If
I have seen further than others, it is because I have stood on the shoulders
of giants" was written in a letter to Hooke, who was a dwarf. Having figured
out the law of gravitation, Newton tossed it in a drawer, afraid to publish
lest Hooke somehow end up with the credit. A contemporary called upon him to
discuss gravitation. Newton rummaged around and found his proofs. "Whilst
others sought the law of gravitation, Newton had lost it", the visitor
wrote. If I told you all the things that ran through my mind that day, you'd
be afraid to come near me.

Just
like Dulles.

Somebody's
been feeding the quokkas. The island's name is Dutch for "rat's nest".
The explorer who discovered it first through they were cats, then rats. They're
actually members of the wallaby family. I found the trick of mountain biking
is shift-on-demand to keep the level of exertion constant. If you don't do that,
you're squandering precious momentum, or failing to gain it while you have the
chance. With my new improved conditioning, I did pretty good on the hills. I
was walking up the steepest hill on the island when a lady with a trailer with
a baby in it, saying "Oh my God", passed me.

The Pinnacles
are about 3 hours north of Perth. This is completely unique. Even better than
Middle Earth in New Zealand.

Here's
what happened. 35,000 years ago (decling Treta yuga before last), Western Australia
was wet. The ocean deposited a layer of seashells, which turned into limestone.
The ocean receeded. The limestone was covered with sand, and eucalpytus trees
grew. The trees are quite acidic. Acid leeched from their root systems, creating
a cone-shaped shell of calcium below. The climate dried out. The trees burned
off. The sand blew away. The soft limestone quickly eroded, except where protected
by a calcium shell.

Tree
roots visible in the shell.

Taproot
visible in the shell.

Once
the shell is breeched, the powery limestone inside quickly erodes. So if you
want to see the Pentacles, this is the millenium to do it.

Bay
at the small fishing village of Lancelin. There are white sand dunes across
the highway.

Peter
deflates the tyres to half pressure so the bus can go on the dunes.

Tour
guide Peter (right) was reserved but exuded a quiet warmth. He said this was
about his 1,000th trip to the Pinnacles, as far as he could reckon. Indian,
Israeli and Japanese tourists R-L.

Sandboarding
the dunes was a blast. You're going really really fast by the time you hit the
bottom, and if you try to moderate the speed at all, you dump. I went down about
twice as often as anybody else.

Tour
bus on the dunes. Peter went charging up and down literally 45-degree slopes.
I couldn't believe any insurance company in the world would let him do this!
You can't really see what's going on in the picture. See where the red abruptly
stops in the sand? That's the edge of a cliff we're about to go down.

This
being me, I left my sunnies in the tour bus office (disappeared), my biker roo
in an Indian restaraunt (recovered). This being Western Australia, the hotel
put me in a smoking room, missed one of the wakeup calls, and although I had
the same cold buffet every morning, charged me a different amount varying from
$13 (correct) to $18.